Flashback Friday: Election Technology

As I watched the election results this past Tuesday night, I was blown away by some of the technology we saw in use to do such simple things as show us the vote total of any given state. Being the “old coot” of the TechnoBuffalo staff, it made me think back to some elections I’ve watched over the years and just how far even simple things such as this have come.

I choose this week’s clip based on the 1976 election of Jimmy Carter being the first one I can remember. As I was born in 1971, I have no memories of the 1972 re-election of Nixon, and even my memories of the Ford and Carter election are hazy at best, but I can recall watching through out the evening with my parents.

As you can see, things were pretty low tech back in the day. As I watched CNN, NBC and others going over to walls, touching and pulling up the results for any county in the country at that very moment, it was just mind blowing. Never mind the fact they could pull up the three previous elections for comparison by just making another tap, I really felt like we were in the future of elections.

When it comes to the reporting of the results, however, get as fancy as you want, I’ll take it all. Yes, I could do without the, “See how high up the building candidate x’s scaffold is? That tells you how many electoral votes they have!” type of stuff, but keep giving me those nifty zoom-in maps!